Senior Research Scholar; Director, Asia for Educators; Director, Columbia University National Coordinating Site of the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia

Education about East Asia in U.S. schools; education in China

Roberta Martin is director of the Asia for Educators program (AFE) at Columbia, a position she has held since 1979. AFE encompasses the East Asian Curriculum Project for the precollege educators and the Columbia Project on Asia in the Core Curriculum for the undergraduate level. Dr. Martin is also one of five founding directors of the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia (NCTA) and head of its Columbia Coordinating Site. (See below, in the Asia for Educators section, for details.) Dr. Martin is an associate editor of Education about Asia, a publication of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS). She also served as chair of the Committee on Teaching about Asia (CTA) of the AAS from 1993 to 1996 and as a member of the Association’s Committee on Educational Issues and Policies from 1995 to 1998. She has served as a member of the advisory board of ASIANetwork, been a member of the board of trustees of the New Jersey Council for History Education, and has served on review committees of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Education Division, and as a consultant to the New York City Board of Education, the New York State Department of Education, the Social Science Education Consortium, the National Council for History Standards, Annenberg/CPB, McGraw-Hill, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Prentice Hall, and Houghton-Mifflin publishers, among others.

Dr. Martin is producer of the Asia for Educators website and of the Webmodules on thatsite. Her primary attention now is focused on ways to utilize distance technology to provide teachers and their students with professional development opportunities and cutting edge content on East Asia in formats that are readily accessible to their interests and time constraints. Her research in the past focused on education in China and recruitment into the Chinese Communist Party. She is the author of Party Recruitment in China (East Asian Institute Occasional Papers, 1981)and “Socializationof Children in China and Taiwan,” whichappeared as an article in China Quarterly and as a chapter in Comparative Education, ed. Altbach et al.(Prentice Hall,1982); and “Party Building after Mao,” in Contemporary China. Dr. Martin is alsoexecutive editor of numerous publications,some of which include her authored contributions,such as Masterworks of Asian Literature in Comparative Perspective: A Guide for Teaching; Asian Case Studies in the Social Sciences: A Guide for Teaching; and Asia in Western and World History: A Guide for Teaching (M. E.Sharpe); Contemporary Japan: A Teaching Workbook; China: A Teaching Workbook; and Central Themes for Teaching about China. She is also the producer of twovideo series: “Japanese History” and “Literature and the Confucian Tradition” (Annenberg/CBP); and chair and editor oftwo surveys: “National Survey on Asia in American Textbooks” (1993) and “Is There a Place for Japan and Asia in American Schools?” (1990).

Dr. Martin holds a BA from Smith College, an MA from Columbia Teachers College, and a PhD in Chinese politics from Columbia. She has also studied in Geneva and Taipei and taught at Columbia, Fordham, and, for the past decade, in the Social Studies program at Teachers College.